Robinson Jeffers is one of the great maverick poets of modern American literature. When the verse narrative had all but gone out of style, he continued to write long narrative poems. His meter of choice is an extraordinarily long line of accentual verse that inevitably stretches beyond any editor's page length. His intent is mercilessly didactic. His lyrics, with few exceptions, are sonnet-length and purposely prophetic, with the tones of the Hebrew Bible's Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (some readers saw his poems as minisermons). He was a devout pantheist, whose religion disturbed and even frightened the conventionally pious. His intent was to instill in his verse the cyclic rhythms that make the world divinely but terribly beautiful, an eternal processing of sacrifice and sacrament. His vision of reality was materialistic and deterministic, a universe in which cycle ruled everything, and violence and pain were the inevitable price of...